Along with the many people mourning our seventeen-year old son’s untimely death at the First Parish Unitarian service, there would have been one person slow clapping in the back, celebrating not Jesse’s life, but his passing. That would have been our former president, the one who refused to cover the medical costs of his nephew’s son with the same condition: cerebral palsy. The one who told the child’s father their child would be better off dead. From my forthcoming memoir, Five Dog Epiphany at Gracie Belle/Akashic Publishing:

“If I riff through the catalog of horrendous things uncomfortable people have said to me regarding the death of my son, I could dredge up some real gaspers…People offering sympathy to bereaved parents are at a huge disadvantage. I feel a certain sympathy for them because anything they say is terrible and wrong. The situation is the definition of awkward and no-win. The woman interviewing us to adopt a rescue dog… can picture how we once made the leap to loving this child. And this is better than the people who say, who actually verbalize the words, “Oh, he was disabled? Then it’s for the best,” as if they are the directors of eugenics at Hitler’s Operation T4, and their job is now a little easier with the removal of one more “useless eater.” On the terrible day of Jesse’s death, my elderly ninety-something neighbor across the street was the first one on the scene that frosty January morning, after the fire trucks and paramedics arrived. As my husband and I scrambled to the police car, she stood at the top of our driveway, an angel of death swaddled in mufti.

“Jesse’s dead,” I said, stunned at saying it aloud. “Then it’s for the best,” she said, the progenitor of many Grim Reapers, all echoing the same unbelievable sentence. “

Jesse brought joy to us, his parents, every single day he was on this earth, though we had a two-year struggle for his inclusion in public school, where he thrived and made the honor roll every semester. My husband and I work in a business that can infantilize you and make you think you are the center of the universe. Our son was our true north, our best teacher, the one who pointed us to unconditional love and the joy that touch of the divine can bring.

The rest of the country wants to return to the kind of joy and laughter we experienced with our disabled son. The former president’s quote to his nephew Fred Trump about his disabled son was that his parents should “let him die”…savvy advice, as it turns out, for what we need to do to Trump’s dark-visioned campaign. It’s suffering from an incurable necrosis of the soul and is infecting our country with hatred, and it should just…die.